GWS Steering Committee Bios

Dr. Tim McCall’s research centers on art of the Italian Renaissance courts, and on the visual intersections of power and gender more broadly.  Though an art historian, the questions that animate his research – whether on fashion and adornment, portraiture and power, or secrecy and visual culture – cut across the humanities, and he is very much interested in rigorous interdisciplinary engagement. His teaching and research address issues of power and chivalry; the history of fashion; material culture; the history of sexuality; and the ideological ramifications of constructions of beauty. 

All of Dr. McCall's classes critically explore gender, though for GWS in particular he taught “Gender, Sexuality and Visual Culture” – which he intends to offer again. He hopes to engage both the History of Sexuality and the History of Fashion in future teaching. 
Dr. McCall was a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and co-edited Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2013). Forthcoming studies investigate clothing, adornment, bodies, and masculinity in fifteenth-century Italy, and visual and material culture related to the Griselda tale (told by Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch). The monograph Brilliant Bodies: Men at Court in Early Renaissance Italy should be out soon. 


Dr. Lisa Sewell has been the director of programming for Gender and Women's Studies since 2008. She is also a member of the English Department where she teaches courses on creative writing and contemporary American poetry. She is the author of several collections of poems and co-editor of two collections of essays on contemporary American poetry. Her research often focuses on issues of gender and sexuality, for example, she contributed an essay on Feminist poets to the Cambridge Companion to Post-1945  American Poetry and she is currently editing a collection of essays on contemporary North American women poets for Wesleyan University Press.

Dr. Cheryl Carleton is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics in the Villanova School of Business.  She teaches courses in Micro Principles, Micro Theory and Women in the Economy at the undergraduate level and Global Political Economy at the MBA level.  In addition she is the Director of the Villanova Women’s Professional Network, which is a rather new committee designed to sponsor and support events that are designed to connect Villanova women and encourage their professional growth and development. Cheryl received her BA from Boston College and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  Before coming to Villanova she worked at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC.  One of her main areas of interest is labor economics, in particular the role of women in the labor force.  Her most recent article, which was published in The Eastern Economic Association Journal and was co-authored with Dr. Suzanne Clain, explores differences in job satisfaction between women and men. Her current research looks at explaining the declining labor force participation of married women. 

Dr. Alice Dailey specializes in English literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Her principal research interests are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, especially Shakespeare, and devotional, hagiographic, and martyrological literature.  Her research coheres around a broad set of questions about how stories of violence are told and retold.  She is interested in the literary forms we use to organize and rehearse acts of violence, especially forms that are recycled across time in long-lasting literary genres.  In particular, her work looks at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recyclings of scenes of violence from biblical, patristic, medieval, or relatively contemporary models.  These interests have led Dr. Dailey to two main projects focused on rather disparate literary materials.  The first is her first book, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution, which studies the development of English martyr literature from the late Middle Ages to the execution of King Charles I in 1649.  This book considers how the martyrologicalform—traditionally defined by strict paradigm repetition—attempts to reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking legitimation through martyrdom during the tumultuous period of the English Reformation.  Her current research project is on Shakespeare’s history plays.  This work brings together theories of performance, memory, trauma, and somatics to think about the representation of dead, dismembered, and remembered historical bodies on the early modern stage.

Teaching and studying literary representations of violence necessarily entail attention to gender—in particular, to how female bodies function in male-dominated literary forms like aristocratic history and Christian martyrology.  It is Dr. Dailey’s hope that this kind of inquiry opens up for her students productive critical questions about gender and sexuality.  Outside the classroom, she is concerned with the general wellbeing and development of our young women.  Increased opportunities for women mean a difficult balancing act between work and family that many of our students will face as they seek positions of professional authority.  As a female faculty member and a member of the GWS steering committee, Dr. Dailey wants to encourage conversation about this on campus, raising consciousness about the model we offer young women and empowering them to approach these difficult questions with self-knowledge and independence.

Diane Penneys Edelman is a Professor of Law and Director of International Programs at Villanova University School of Law, where she has taught since 1993.  She teaches Legal Research, Analysis, Writing, & Oral Advocacy I and II, supervises externships at arts-related organizations, and directs and teaches in the Law School’s summer program in Rome, co-sponsored by the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis).  She is Co-Chair of the International Law Committee of the Philadelphia Bar Association, and an active member and former officer of the International Legal Education and Specialist Certification Committee of the American Bar Association International Law Section.  She has also served as President and a Board Member of theLawyers’ Committee on Cultural Heritage Preservation.


Dr. Amy Fleischer is Professor and Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Villanova.  She has been on the faculty for 15 years and has a serious interest in GWS particularly as related to women in the STEM fields.She is also Director of the NovaTherm Research Laboratory. Her research interests include the broad topics of sustainable energy system design and thermal management of electronic systems. Dr. Fleischer was recognized as the ASME Electronics and Photonics Packaging Division (EPPD) 2010 Women Engineer of the Year  and was awarded the 2011 ASME K-16/ EPPD Clock Award in recognition of her outstanding and continuing contributions to the science and engineering of heat transfer in electronics. Dr. Fleischer has supported 17 graduate students to degree completion and worked with 37 undergraduate researchers. She is the author of more than 80 technical peer reviewed papers, and recently published a monograph entitled  Phase Change Materials: Fundamentals and Applications.  

Dr. Heather Hicks teaches and does research in the areas of post-1945 fiction, postmodern theory, feminist fiction and theory, science fiction, and contemporary film.  Her book, The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative, explores a range of texts, from comic strips, management textbooks, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood films, to postmodern fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and others, in order to map the cultural responses to the emergence of what she calls “soft work”—labor practices driven by a set of post-World War Two management techniques, including human relations, self-actualization, and corporate culture, which conceived of workers primarily as emotional beings.

Dr. Hicks is currently working on a project that explores recent apocalyptic fiction written by major literary figures, including Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead and others. On the broadest, formal level, she is interested in what happens when the novel, the quintessential literary expression of modernity, mingle with the much older apocalyptic tradition, which, since the Enlightenment, has become the story of the fall of modernity. In the context of work written in the last decade or so, these issues are further complicated by the rejuvenation of a perceived civilizational conflict between the forces of modernity and anti-modernity effected by the events of September 11th, 2001. Other questions she is currently mulling over in relation to this project have to do with the vexed status of historicism in this body of recent fiction, which seems deeply invested in more cyclical and mythic modes of temporality; the significance of the sublime as a category in these narratives’ visions of cataclysm; the popularity of apocalyptic narratives among young adult readers; and what all of this might or might not have to do with a number of other social, economic, and historical paradigms, including globalization, neoliberalism, and the end of the cold war.

Dr. Jean Lutes specializes in American women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Inspired in part by her first career as a newspaper reporter, she has always been fascinated by the dynamic exchange between journalistic practices and literary work. Her first book, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture, argued that the gritty, male-dominated vision of newspaper work associated with the rise of literary realism in the United States obscures a vibrant alternative tradition of women’s reporting. That tradition featured not objectivity and detachment, but rather material embodiment and emotional engagement. Her interest in Nellie Bly, an adventurous newspaperwoman from the late nineteenth century who broke into journalism by becoming a “girl stunt reporter,” inspired her second book project: she edited and wrote an introduction for Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly, forthcoming from Penguin Classics in May 2014.

She is now working on a book about mass print culture, emotionality, and women's narratives in early twentieth-century America. As co-director of GWS, she seeks to honor and nurture the interdisciplinary work of feminist scholarship, which has shaped her own research interests in profound ways.

Dr. Shauna M. MacDonald likes to tell stories and teach others to tell their own more creatively. A performance studies specialist, performer, teacher, and researcher, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication here at Villanova, where she teaches courses in Performance Studies and Qualitative Research Methods. You can also find her through various campus events and initiatives: she co-directs in their Elizabeth Cady Stanton Conference performances each year, advises the student leaders of NovaSVA (Nova Sexual Violence Awareness), and loves to perform and/or help out with poetry slams and other socially conscious performances on campus, including (in 2015) The Vagina Monologues. Dr. MacDonald believes in creating academic environments worthy of our feminist beliefs and goals. In her my classrooms, in her office, and in her work on campus, she aims to make space for feminism, queer theory, and intersectionality; and for conversations about gender and sexual violence; inequality in the workplace; LGBTQ identity; women’s bodies, health concerns, and experiences; and the connections between patriarchy and the interlocking oppressions that create a world uninhabitable for anyone touched by the many marks of difference.

Dr. MacDonald’s research focuses on the intersections between place, space, and (public) memory; posthuman understandings of human-technology relations; performance/art as methodology and epistemology; and the performances of gender that permeate all of these areas of cultural life. She has studied women’s embodied experiences in various contexts, including female martial artists’ identity negotiation, menstruation as philosophical proof of interconnected subjectivity, female bodies as cyborg bodies, and women’s experiences as lighthouse keepers. Her current research project is an ongoing study using performance ethnography as a method for examining lighthouses as sites of performance and public memory. She is writing and performing about lighthouses’ cultural functions, lighthouse keeping (by men and women), and the techo-cultural discourse surrounding lighthouses and their survival. If you’re looking for her work, you can find it in Women’s Studies in Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, Liminalities, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. 

 


  Dr. Evan Radcliffe's field is Romantic literature, and his main focus is on the relation of this literature to the controversies around the French Revolution—in particular, the ways in which Romantic literature reflects and responds to the political and moral-philosophical debates of the 1790s, debates about such topics as patriotism, the value of local affections, the ideal of universal benevolence, and the ways in which traditions enable or constrict moral choices. The essay on which he is currently working grows out of a conference presentation on Wordsworth’s play The Borderers.  He contends that although supporters of the French Revolution attempted to enlist both justice and sympathy for their cause, they could not escape the conflicts between the two ideals that earlier moral philosophers first outlined. These conflicts, he argues, were made especially pressing by the way that the constant presence of vengeance in France undermined ideas about justice.  Dr, Radcliffe is pursuing how, by exploring these issues in The Borderers, Wordsworth sets up his own future stance as a narrative poet, a stance that is not only specifically literary but also has significant affinities with the ways in which modern philosophers discuss the relations between acting and refraining from action, and between doing and allowing harm.

Much of Dr. Radcliffe's scholarship considers questions of narrative, questions that are also becoming more important in his teaching. Along with Romantic literature he teaches Greek classical literature, and his interest in literature in relation to moral philosophy has (together with the collaboration between the English department and Villanova Law School in hosting two Law and Literature conferences) resulted in his regularly teaching a session on literature, narrative, and ethics in a course at the Law School.

  

Dr. Heidi Rose, associate professor in the Department of Communication, holds a B.S. in Speech/Theatre from Northwestern University, an M.A. in Communication from Emerson College, and an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Communication and Performance Studies from Arizona State University.

Dr. Rose's teaching and research focus primarily on performance, culture, and identity. Her research on Deaf culture and the poetics of American Sign Language (ASL) has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Language in Society, and The Journal of Applied Communication Research. She co-edited and contributed to the first-ever book/DVD on ASL literary theory and criticism, Signing the Body Poetic: Essays in American Sign Language Literature, published by the University of California Press.

Dr. Rose’s research has been supported by grants from Villanova University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society. Her current projects examine Jamaican theatre and postcolonial identity, and the phenomenology of autobiographical solo performance. She recently wrote and performed a solo piece entitled Good Enough for the SoLow Performance Festival in Philadelphia.

Dr. Rose is the immediate past Editor-in-Chief for Text and Performance Quarterly, the flagship journal of performance studies for the National Communication Association. She serves on the board of directors for PlayPenn, an organization dedicated to the development of new plays and is a member of the National Communication Association, PSi: Performance Studies International, and the Eastern Communication Association.

Dr. Sally Scholz has taught in Gender and Women's Studies for almost twenty years offering courses on feminist philosophy, feminist epistemology, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.  Scholz’s early research focused on violence against women, oppression, and peacemaking.  She has also published books on Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Her recent research focuses on the moral relations of solidarity.  In 2008 she published Political Solidarity (Penn State Press) and continues this interest in solidarity with research on global and transnational feminist accounts of solidarity.  A small part of that may be seen in Feminism: A Beginner’s Guide (One World 2010). Scholz is a former editor of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy (July 2003-June 2008) and recently guest edited a Special Issue of Hypatia on Crossing Borders (Vol. 28.2).  She currently serves on the American Philosophical Association Board of Officers as Chair of the Committee on Lectures, Publications, and Research and is also Vice President of the North American Society for Social Philosophy.  In July 2013, Scholz became the Editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the premier journal in the field.  The editorial offices, housed in Falvey Memorial Library, serve as a significant reminder of the importance of gender and women's studies feminist research on campus and beyond.

Katina Sawyer, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Villanova University in Psychology, within the Graduate Programs in Human Resource Development.  Dr. Sawyer has widely published and presented her research on leadership, diversity and work-life balance. She has also specifically studied the effect of diversity on teams that have experienced discrimination within the military. She owns an organizational consulting firm, K. Sawyer Solutions, LLC, specializing in diversity and inclusion. She is currently co-chair of the Speakers Series for the Women’s Resource Center in PA, a Board member of the Philadelphia Society of People and Strategy, and is a volunteer and fundraiser at Dawn’s Place (a home for victims of sex trafficking). Dr. Sawyer serves as co-advisor for Villanova’s undergraduate club, Nova for Sexual Violence Awareness. She holds a dual-Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Women’s Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Villanova University. 

Dr. Ellen Bonds has taught at Villanova for the past twenty-six years and has been involved in the Gender and Women’s Studies program (formerly Women’s Studies) for most of that time.  She received her B.A. in English from the University of Louisville, her Master’s Degree from West Chester University, and her Ph.D. from Lehigh University.  As a member of the English Department, she teaches courses in composition, American literature, African American literature, and women’s literature.  She is the author of a number of articles on literature of the American South, Faulkner, Morrison, and August Wilson.